Amazon, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart are not built for the find. the psychological feeling that comes not from the search bar but from the joy of shopping in its purest form. HomeGoods’s game is the delight of the unexpected, aka the “find” - i.e. Not once does the above say anything about shipping because shipping is not a point of differentiation. ![]() And, oh by the way, this is essentially the exact same technology that could be lit up through smart Facebook and Instagram ads at the point of serendipitous discovery, too. That is omnichannel greatness, and that is what HomeGoods has been missing and how it could also continue to differentiate itself in the marketplace. She is just consuming on her own schedule. She later receives the notification via text, clicks on the notification, and then reserves the item for pickup on Saturday and after she plans to be finished taking the rug rats to their soccer practices.Īll in all, she gets the same great HomeGoods treasure hunt experience, but she gets it on her schedule and at a time when circumstances would have otherwise prevented her from going into the store. She asks HomeGoods to notify her of when the product is available to be purchased for pickup in store. Imagine the same local Des Moines HomeGoods enthusiast has her eye on a new chair that is arriving on Saturday at a hot price. With all the above now in play, the third and final step HomeGoods should take to achieve off-price omnichannel greatness is to make its localized inventory online available for curbside and in-store pickup at the top of the funnel on its product landing and detail pages. Customers can then browse from the upcoming selections, ask for notifications of the upcoming events via text, or even, dare one say it, get spurred to go into their local stores to snap up something they like before they risk letting it go on sale. Once the inventory is localized as described above, the next thing HomeGoods should do is to take a page from Nike’s Sneakers App and tie the product deliveries at the store level to the time of day and in-store arrival schedule.įor instance, if new chairs at hot prices are set to arrive on a Saturday or if new markdowns are planned for the following Tuesday, HomeGoods should let customers know via upcoming “inventory drop” or “price cut” features online. #2 - Product drops should be timed to the day ![]() He or she can then browse, search, or do whatever he or she wants, and then also rest assured that all the items in the online store are unique to the Des Moines locale and that he or she is not danger of competing with anyone outside of Des Moines to get them. Once this Iowa customer goes online, all the items and the prices of those items should all be personalized, right down to his or her local store in Des Moines, the second he or she opens his or her mobile or desktop browser. Say, for example, a customer lives in Des Moines, IA. To do it right online, everything needs to be personalized via a digital front face so that loyal HomeGoods customers shopping online feel the same way they do standing and waiting to get into a HomeGoods store on a normal Saturday morning. Making this shine through online though is difficult. They all carry small lots of products that are hard to find anywhere else and that vary from store to store. HomeGoods and off-price stores in general are unique. It needs to make something that looks like this: #1 - Each digital visit should be tailored to a local HomeGoods store It needs to put forward something that has never been done before, something that plays on its strengths and that has nothing to do with traditional ways of thinking. No, if HomeGoods is to be successful in its e-commerce foray, it needs to seize the opportunity in a different way. ![]() Amazon AMZN, Wayfair, Walmart, Target, and Overstock all do that already, and the landscape is littered with countless others that have also tried and failed. ![]() It’s just a question of what the there looks like because the ultimate answer isn’t that HomeGoods should just enter e-commerce and start shipping products left and right. Online resale sites, like ThredUp and The RealReal REAL, are probably the next closest siblings to off-price deal hunting, but there, too, the items are all preowned, and the overall economics work quite differently from how TJX and HomeGoods operate day-to-day.Īll that being said, there’s a there, there, somewhere. Online flash sale models have tried to approximate the concept, but they are like the red-headed stepchildren of off-price retailing because they are predicated on deal fever for large quantities of single items versus a plethora of routined unexpected delights at local stores. A myriad of companies have tried to simulate the psychology of the find online, but none have ever really captured its ethos.
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